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Roy Winnick effectively updates the annotations so vital to scholarship in Christopher Ricks’s 1987 edition of Tennyson to create an important new reference work. Particularly significant are the echoes of women poets that Winnick locates in Tennyson’s poetry in addition to new biblical and classical allusions. In its print version Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels is a handbook for systematic study of Tennyson; in digital form it is a highly useful searchable database.

—Prof. Linda K. Hughes

In Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels, R. H. Winnick identifies more than a thousand previously unknown instances in which Tennyson phrases of two or three to as many as several words are similar or identical to those occurring in prior works by other hands—discoveries aided by the proliferation of digitized texts and the related development of powerful search tools over the three decades since the most recent major edition of Tennyson’s poems was published.

Each of these instances may be deemed an allusion (meant to be recognized as such and pointing, for definable purposes, to a particular antecedent text), an echo (conscious or not, deliberate or not, meant to be noticed or not, meaningful or not), or merely accidental. Unless accidental, Winnick writes, these new textual parallels significantly expand our knowledge both of Tennyson’s reading and of his thematic intentions and artistic technique. Coupled with the thousand-plus textual parallels previously reported by Christopher Ricks and other scholars, he says, they suggest that a fundamental and lifelong aspect of Tennyson’s art was his habit of echoing any work, ancient or modern, which had the potential to enhance the resonance or deepen the meaning of his poems.

The new textual parallels Winnick has identified point most often to the King James Bible and to such canonical authors as Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Cowper, Shelley, Byron, and Wordsworth. But they also point to many authors rarely if ever previously cited in Tennyson editions and studies, including Michael Drayton, Richard Blackmore, Isaac Watts, Erasmus Darwin, John Ogilvie, Anna Lætitia Barbauld, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, John Wilson, and—with surprising frequency—Felicia Hemans.

Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels is thus a major new resource for Tennyson scholars and students, an indispensable adjunct to the 1987 edition of Tennyson’s complete poems edited by Christopher Ricks.

Numbers and alphanumerics (such as ‘1A’) before poem titles are those assigned by Christopher Ricks in his 1987 edition of Tennyson’s complete poems (see Preface). An asterisk following a poem number indicates that the poem appears in both the selected and the complete Ricks edition; its absence, that the poem appears only in the latter.

Idylls of the King
464* The Coming of Arthur
465* Gareth and Lynette
466* The Marriage of Geraint
467* Geraint and Enid
468* Balin and Balan
469* Merlin and Vivien
470* Lancelot and Elaine
471* The Holy Grail
472* Pelleas and Ettarre
473* The Last Tournament
474* Guinevere
475* The Passing of Arthur

Alphabetical Index of Tennyson Poems Discussed

Index of Antecedent Writers and Works Discussed

R. H. Winnick holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Princeton University. As a graduate student at Princeton, he co-authored Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938–1963 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977), volume 3 of the late Lawrance Thompson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning (for volume 2) ‘official’ biography, for which he received dissertation credit. He next researched the biography of the American poet, playwright, educator, journalist, and statesman Archibald MacLeish, and edited Letters of Archibald MacLeish 1907 to 1982 (Houghton Mifflin, 1983). As an independent scholar, Winnick has also published or placed eighteen articles on Chaucer, Sidney, Shakespeare, Melville, Clough, Hardy, and Larkin—most of these on textual parallels in the works of those authors—in The Chaucer Review, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Victorian Poetry, The Hardy Review, Literary Imagination, Notes and Queries, and About Larkin.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

Attribution should include the following information: R. H. Winnick, Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2019. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0161